The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

There is a pirate in the basement. (The pirate is a metaphor but also still a person.) (The basement could rightly be considered a dungeon.) The pirate was placed here for numerous acts of a piratey nature considered criminal enough for punishment by those non-pirates who decide such things.

Wondering if the difference between pirates and thieves is a matter of boats and hats.

A boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.

And so the son of the fortune-teller does not find his way to the Starless Sea. Not yet.

Reading a novel, he supposes, is like playing a game where all the choices have been made for you ahead of time by someone who is much better at this particular game.

He looks down at the last two words on the page. Not yet. Those two words swim through a thousand questions flooding his mind.

He sat in his childhood closet after he found the door, he remembers that now. It was a better closet for sitting. A deeper one, with pillows he had dragged in to make it more comfortable. That one didn’t have a door to Narnia, either, he knows because he checked.

“I don’t jest about tea.

“The reader. The player. The audience. That’s what you bring to it, even if you don’t make the choices along the way, you decide what it means to you.” The knitting girl pauses to catch a slipped stitch and then continues. “A game or a book that has meaning to me might be boring to you, or vice versa. Stories are personal, you relate or you don’t.” “Like I said, everyone wants to be part of a story.” “Everyone is a part of a story, what they want is to be part of something worth recording. It’s that fear of mortality, ‘I Was Here and I Mattered’ mind-set.”

“Isn’t it easier to have words on a page and leave everything up to the imagination?” another of the English majors asks, a girl in a fuzzy red sweater. “The words on the page are never easy,” the girl in the cat-eye glasses points out and several people nod. “Simpler, then.” Red-sweater girl holds up a pen. “I can create a whole world with this, it may not be innovative but it’s effective.” “It is until you run out of ink,” someone retorts.

Paper is fragile, even when bound with string in cloth or leather. The majority of the stories within the Harbor on the Starless Sea are captured on paper. In books or on scrolls or folded into paper birds and suspended from ceilings. There are stories that are more fragile still: For every tale carved in rock there are more inscribed on autumn leaves or woven into spiderwebs. There are stories wrapped in silk so their pages do not fall to dust and stories that have already succumbed, fragments collected and kept in urns. They are fragile things. Less sturdy than their cousins who are told aloud and learned by heart. And there are always those who would watch Alexandria burn. There always have been. There always will be. So there are always guardians.

“So far so good, but I don’t like to commit to an opinion until the end of a book because you never know what might happen.

Patience & Fortitude 1 a.m. Bring a flower.

“Everyone wants the stars. Everyone wishes to grasp that which exists out of reach. To hold the extraordinary in their hands and keep the remarkable in their pockets.”

“Will you be needing to know the location of Mecca?” the Keeper asks. “Oh, no, thanks, though. I’m agnostopagan.” The Keeper cocks his head questioningly. “Spiritual but not religious,” Zachary clarifies. He doesn’t say what he is thinking, which is that his church is held-breath story listening and late-night-concert ear-ringing rapture and perfect-boss fight-button pressing. That his religion is buried in the silence of freshly fallen snow, in a carefully crafted cocktail, in between the pages of a book somewhere after the beginning but before the ending.

Always winter never nondenominational seasonal holidays, Zachary Narnia-thinks

“She talked a lot about eggs and keeping them from breaking.” “If an egg breaks it becomes more than it was,” Mirabel says, after considering the matter. “And what is an egg, if not something waiting to be broken?” “I think the egg was a metaphor.” “Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few metaphors,”

To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are. It’s nice to finally have someone read stories I know so intimately. Which was your favorite?”

Dorian nods, thoughtfully. “Is that a wardrobe?” he asks, gesturing at the piece of furniture on the other side of the room. “Yes,” Zachary says, distracted into stating the obvious. “Have you checked it?” “For what?” Zachary asks but realizes as Dorian’s disbelieving eyebrow rises. “Oh. Oh, no, I haven’t.” It is, he thinks, the only proper wardrobe he has ever had and after the considerable amount of time he has spent sitting in closets literally and figuratively he cannot believe he has not yet checked this one for a door to Narnia.

“I have never been particularly fond of Narnia myself,” Dorian says as he runs his fingers over the carved wooden doors. “Too much direct allegory for my tastes. Though it does have a certain romance to it. The snow. The gentlemanly satyr.”

“Do you believe in magic, Miss Hawkins?” “In an Arthur C. Clarke sufficiently-advanced-technology-is-indistinguishable-from-magic type magic or actual magic-magic?”

There is always room for more books.”

And no story ever truly ends as long as it is told.